As I was researching technical documentation for Office 365 I suddenly realized that -while there isn't much in terms of technical specification and published protocols for Office 365- this new online offering actually relies on a serie of other stacks, namely MS SharePoint and Lync.

If you wonder what are the implications of such dependencies, you have to realize that Office 365 does not rely on standard dependencies, and even the protocols and dependencies of Office 365 are not published for the moment. In other words, you can't get an Apache server running with Office 365 on top of it; you have to use specific platforms and products from MSFT. This could lead to an increasing vendor lock-in and more abuse of public procurement and tenders. Let me explain: Administration X wants to use an online office suite an choses Office 365. Fair enough, it may choose to do so, but did Administration X choose to buy SharePoint as well? And once it has SharePoint, then why keep the other groupware and CMS software it runs aside SharePoint?

It might be very useful to monitor whether there's a trend emerging here in the next months / year.